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Humans are pure mental substances, that is essentially souls, who have a rich mental life of sensations, thoughts, intentions, and other pure mental events, largely caused by and sometimes causing events in their brains and so in their bodies. God has reason to create humans because humans have a kind of goodness, the ability to choose between good and evil, which God himself does not have. The existence of these causal connections between mental events and brain events requires an enormous number of separate psychophysical laws. It is most improbable that there would be such laws if God had not made them. Each soul has a thisness; it is the particular soul it is quite independently of its mental properties and bodily connections. So no scientific law, concerned only with relations between substances in virtue of their universal properties, could explain why God created this soul rather than that possible soul, and connected it to this body. Yet a rational person often has to choose between equally good alternatives on non-rational grounds; and so there is nothing puzzling about God choosing to create this soul rather than that possible soul. Hence the existence of souls provides a good argument for the existence of God.

This article suggests that different philosophical traditions have developed and matured around particular conceptual metaphors. It proposes that conceptual metaphor theory provides a useful tool with which to think about different world philosophical traditions, as it can reveal the deep structure of networks of ideas. Conceptual metaphors are not just linguistic devices; rather they organize whole networks of thought, experience, and activity. This idea is explored and special attention paid to the role of those conceptual metaphors that structure ways of thinking about knowledge within Western, Indian, and East Asian traditions. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of this approach for inter-cultural philosophy of religion.

I think that there is much about contemporary philosophy of religion that should change. Most importantly, philosophy of religion should be philosophy of religion, not merely philosophy of theism, or philosophy of Christianity, or philosophy of certain denominations of Christianity, or the like. Here, however, I shall complain about one fairly narrow aspect of contemporary philosophy of religion that really irks me: its obsession with derivations that have as their conclusion either the claim that God exists or the claim that God does not exist. I shall work myself up by degrees.

In this article I seek to show the importance of spirituality for a neo-Aristotelian account of ‘the good life’. First, I lay out my account of spirituality. Second, I discuss why the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life has often either been ignored or explicitly excluded from consideration by neo-Aristotelians. I suggest that a lot turns on how one understands the ‘ethical naturalism’ to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. Finally, I argue that through a deeper exploration of the evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as ‘meaning-seeking animals’ we can come to better appreciate the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded history up to the present and why we can be described as homo religiosus.

It is often objected to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead that if we reject dualism and disembodied existence there is no way even for God to bring it about that a resurrected person is identical with his or her supposed original, rather than just a duplicate. My response is that if God intended all along that people should have two periods of existence, the problem vanishes. In a Test Match, there are long periods when the ground and stands are empty and no play takes place, yet no-one says that the resumed game may only be a duplicate of that of the previous day. The same holds for a resurrection intended from the beginning.

The problem of evil is typically presented as a problem – sometimes the problem – facing theistic realists. This article takes no stance on what effect (if any) the existence of evil has on the rationality of theistic belief. Instead, it explores the possibility of using the problem of evil to generate worries for some of those who reject theistic realism. Although this article focuses on the consequences for a particular kind of religious fictionalist, the lessons adduced are intended to have more general application.

The problem of evil contains some evaluative claims. Recognizing the fundamental role of the evaluative claims within the problem of evil presents two significant problems for the argument from evil. First, in order for the argument from evil to be successful, the normative assumptions that underlie the evaluative claims within the problem of evil must be deployed consistently both within the problem and between those who are discussing the problem. This level of normative agreement is likely to be difficult to achieve. Second, the argument from evil moves from evaluative premises to a non-evaluative conclusion, and thus commits the same error that J. L. Mackie identifies the moral argument for the existence of God as committing: it gets the direction of supervenience between facts and values back-to-front. Mackie's criticisms of the moral argument for the existence of God ought to also apply to the moral argument against the existence of God. If my analysis is correct, and Mackie's point is valid, then the argument from evil will be left fatally undermined. The problem of evil cannot be used to argue for the conclusion that ‘God does not exist’.

This article aims to bring some work in contemporary analytic metaphysics to discussions of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I will show that some unusual claims of the Real Presence doctrine exactly parallel what would be happening in the world if objects were to time-travel in certain ways. Such time-travel would make ordinary objects multiply located, and in the relevantly analogous respects. If it is conceptually coherent that objects behave in this way, we have a model for the behaviour of the Eucharist which shows the doctrine to be coherent, at least with respect to the issues discussed.

In Wunder (2013) I observed a probabilistic blunder in Plantinga (2011) and argued that correcting it, while noting Plantinga's acceptance of logically non-contingent theism, had negative consequences for many other of his probabilistic claims. Professor Plantinga kindly replied to my correspondence, but the fruits of that conversation could not be incorporated into Wunder (2013). This article will explain the blunder and summarize my earlier arguments before addressing Plantinga's main replies. I conclude that these replies fail to circumvent most of the problems observed earlier: perhaps most significantly, the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism and theism's logical non-contingency still appear jointly to imply theism's necessary falsehood.

Some thinkers in the Reformed and ‘postmodern’ traditions in theology have argued that natural theology is ‘idolatrous’. This article shows that such arguments hinge on distinguishing the object of revealed theology from the perfect being or first cause. It then shows that, on plausible analyses of worthiness of worship, the perfect being will always be more worthy of worship than anything not identified with it. Natural theology therefore has a proper place in investigating the nature of the ‘true’ God, if an object is the ‘true’ God because it is the being worthy of our worship.

Setting aside the discussion of whether the biblical destruction of the Canaanites actually occurred or was ordered by God, there still remains the philosophical question of whether any good at all justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting or orchestrating the destruction of an entire society. If we grant that the existence of God is incompatible with gratuitous evil, then God must terminate a society when it reaches a point in its history where the net moral value of permitting it to continue becomes negative. This raises at least four concerns which are discussed here.

Some argue that an omniprescient being cannot choose between mutually exclusive actions none of which is known to be uniquely reasonable. The view assumes that faced with such a choice one must believe each alternative to be epistemically possible, thereby precluding foreknowledge of what one will do. E. J. Coffman (2011) has challenged this assumption, but I argue that not only does he fail to undermine it, there are independent reasons why choice – and intentional agency generally – entails a presumption of epistemic possibility. The apparent incompatibility between omniprescience and intentional agency continues to pose a tough choice for theists.

In this article, we argue that a secularist cannot experience Christian art in the same way that a Christian can. To defend this claim, we argue that Christian faith is best conceived as an engagement with God, such that coming to have faith is a transformative, second-person experience where a person comes to know what it is like to be loved by God and that Christian art is best conceived as iconic, such that it is an occasion for, and a mode of, experiencing God. Thus, for the Christian, but not for the secularist, experiencing Christian art consists in an experience of God himself.

The post-war expansion of university faculties climaxed in the early 1970s. Since then, there have been more professional philosophers than ever before in history: a startling claim, but sober truth. In analytic philosophy, they have worked with more rigour and better training than even the Scholastics. It would take a surprising lack of talent among us, or perhaps argue some deep defect in the questions we ask, if the result were not more progress in philosophy than most periods can boast. And in fact, those who know what progress in philosophy looks like can see a lot of it: just compare Malcolm's 1960 piece on the ontological argument with Plantinga's 1974 treatment in The Nature of Necessity, and then both with Oppy's book on the subject.